Search This Blog

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Silvio's new(ish) electoral pledge: Renegotiate the fiscal treaty

Silvio Berlusconi yesterday stepped up his anti-austerity rhetoric another notch. During a quite heated exchange with Italian journalist Maurizio Belpietro on public broadcaster Rai Uno, Berlusconi made a new(ish) electoral pledge: renegotiate the European fiscal treaty.

Here is a translation of the most interesting bits (the full video, in Italian, is available here):

Belpietro: "There's a fiscal treaty which has been signed and ratified by Italy too..."

Berlusconi (interrupts): "No, no, no. We need to go and negotiate with the European Commission. And [we need to] negotiate without getting down on our knees before the European authorities."

[...]

Belpietro: "So would you overturn that agreement? Would you renegotiate it?"

Berlusconi: "Absolutely. Even at the cost of another vote [on the fiscal treaty] in the Italian parliament."

Given Il Cavaliere's notorious obsession with 'the Communists', it is perhaps slightly ironic that he is now basically using the same arguments as the Socialist François Hollande during last year's French presidential campaign. As we stressed in previous blogposts, though, for the average Italian a promise to fight back EU-imposed austerity remains a powerful argument - and that is something which Berlusconi is well aware of.

3 comments:

You say renegotiating the Fiscal Treaty is science fiction. What sort of fiction is the Fiscal Treaty itself? Can we see the French for example, meeting its requirements? Is it a new example of non-science fiction as propounded by the EU?

Since the EU's masters (INCLuding Monti) are hell-bent on pursuing this engineered euro-crisis to achieve their goal of a Federal Europe based on the fruins of the lives of the young unemployed and the destitute across southern Europe Berlusconi wouldn't have a chance in Brussels. They have Italy in a vice-like grip and they will tell him to "Go away".

They are about to tell Cameron the same but we have the ultimate option of going away entirely - and the sooner the better.